If you plan on selling your blog or website, your main goal should be making sure that it’s sold for the highest price possible. Creating a profitable site from scratch isn’t easy but there’s a way to shortcut the process with minimal time and money investment.
Potential buyers will value your website based on applicable factors they can assess, such as traffic and revenue. This means that your focus should be on creating a website that can attract and retain an audience. From establishing a strong online presence and boosting SEO to providing valuable information and building credibility, all these aspects are a reflection of a successful business.
Here are 6 tips to help you prepare your website for sale.
1. Create Quality Content
Poor-quality content is the fastest way to turn away potential clients. The content on your website should be original, well-structured, and clear. In other words, it should be such that the readers can understand it without too much effort.
In addition, your content should be well-researched and provide some kind of value to the readers. Ideally, it should be informative but still fun to read. Sounds complicated?
One way to ‘hack’ content creation is to choose a niche that you’re well-informed about or you personally like. You can also choose a niche that is consistently popular and focus on creating evergreen content. Here are examples of such niches:
- Health and wellness
- Sports and hobbies
- Money and finances
- Personal growth & relationships
Don’t forget to add high-quality images and/or short videos to all your blog posts. Besides making your articles better-looking and easier to read by breaking larger blocks of text, visuals will bring in some image search traffic. Finally, include a call-to-action at the end of each article to make sure that your readers act on what they’ve read.
If content creation is really not your thing, you can turn to freelance platforms like PeoplePerHour and Upwork to hire an expert who will handle the whole writing process for you.
2. Optimize for SEO
Search Engine Optimization is a great way to improve your site’s performance and boost its ranking on search engines. Here’s what you need to pay attention to:
- Conduct keyword research, then make sure to insert the selected keywords throughout your site’s pages and content
- Use short but descriptive URLs
- Write compelling title tags and descriptions
- Optimize your images with descriptive “alt” tags
- Use heading tags in a proper hierarchy
- Link to relevant internal and external resources
- Focus on creating long-form, evergreen content
- Make sure your site loads quickly
3. Use Social Media
Use social media to build a strong online presence and publicize your website. For best results, do this in conjunction with content marketing, i.e. creating and promoting content that influences your customers’ actions. Combined together, these two types of marketing will help you improve your brand reputation.
The power of social networks like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter is huge, so taking advantage of their strengths is definitely worth the effort. If you don’t have time to work with all of them, pick the one platform where your audience is present and focus on doing it really well. For the rest of the platforms, use automation tools to make your job easier.
4. Add a Knowledge Base
Having a knowledge base can provide users with a number of benefits. When you enrich your site with FAQs, manuals, FAQs, how-to articles, and tutorials, your customers will see it as a great source of information. If the knowledge base content is useful and helpful, your website will become a go-to resource every time they need a specific solution. This will help you establish yourself as an expert in your niche and improve your reputation. Ultimately, you’ll expand your customer base, strengthen your brand, and significantly improve your business.
Don’t know how to create a knowledge base? One of the best and easiest ways is by using a knowledge base software.
5. Make It Mobile Friendly
With mobile devices accounting for almost 50% of all internet visits, mobile-friendliness is a quality that your website must-have. Today’s buyers are well aware of the value of owning a site that is mobile-optimized and chances are, this will be one of the main components on their checklist. Search engines also favor mobile-friendly websites and rank them higher in SERPs. Finally, websites that are optimized for mobile are more likely to attract and retain traffic than sites whose mobile displays are poor.
6. Maximize Revenue Generation
Revenue generation is the main goal of any website, so listing a site that has consistently made plenty of money is a great way to attract the buyers’ interest.
Depending on what the focus of your website is, improving its revenue generation is possible with some dedication and hard work. Some of the most effective revenue generation channels are sponsored content, ads, affiliate marketing, and e-commerce. Study your website thoroughly in order to determine which of these channels is the best. You can also combine two or more channels to further increase traffic and earn more money.
Final Thoughts
Regardless of the value, you ascribe to your website, you need to remember that buyers base their valuations on applicable factors they can assess. The above-listed steps might take some time, but the final result will be worth your while if you want to create a site that meets or even surpasses these valuations.